News/Announcements

Two concerts for Piece i Thessaloniki and Athens 08 April 2026

The Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra welcomed Holy Week in a special way this year, with two concerts-prayer for Peace, in Thessaloniki on Holy Monday, in collaboration with the Thessaloniki Concert Hall, and in Athens on Holy Tuesday, at the Stavros Niarchos Hall of the Greek National Opera, in co-production with the GNO.
Together with its two guests, Jewish-German violinist Liv Migdal and Iranian-German conductor Yalda Zamani, the TSSO performed works by Bechara El-Khoury (Lebanon), Hossein Dehlavi (Iran), Paul Ben-Haim (Israel) and Richard Strauss (Germany), which in their own way deal with passion and the path towards death, giving a powerful message of coexistence, unity, hope and love.

The concert's program hosted (always up-to-date) texts by the distinguished Greek theologian, writer and musician Chrysostomos Stamoulis (41964-2025), who distinguished himself as a professor at the Department of Theology of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, for his theological work on love and affection, the opening of theology to society and art, the acceptance of others, and his resistance to phenomena of religious fundamentalism and falsification of Orthodox doctrine. Let us welcome this year's Easter with two characteristic excerpts from them, as the message of these concerts:

"True Orthodoxy proposes a way of being, which, in the face of the culture of the very, in the face of the contemporary phenomena of super-cultures and diametrically opposed exclusive cultures […], has at its center the mystery of the incarnation and the person of Christ. In other words, it proposes a culture of incarnation, a universal culture, which has its roots in the minimum, which hearkens to the double name of emptiness, emptiness of the self and acceptance of the other, of the completely different. The encounter with what I am not. […] And there is no doubt that it is this embrace of the stranger, the alien and the unknown, that reveals the true ministry of ascetic love, the exit from the self. Thus, hospitality escapes the danger, the anomaly of of partiality and proves to be a sea of fairy tales. The philadelphos is also revealed as hospitable. Man once again fulfills the conditions of his nature, as he demonstrates his creativity in the image and likeness of God, which allows him to see; to truly see."
(Chrysostomos A. Stamoulis, "Give me this stranger or The least brother and the culture of "much"". Antidosis, March 7, 2021).

"Of course, for all those who ignore the mystery of self-determination and are lost in the desert of absolute hetero-determination – sometimes anti-Western, sometimes anti-Muslim, sometimes anti-synodal, sometimes anti-academic, sometimes against the against -, "these people were a certain solution", as the Alexandrian emphasizes. A solution that demonstrates the tragedy of the absence of the "gospel of love" and shows at once the "wounded body, the wounded place and the wounded time". And it is these times that give birth and rebirth wandering prophets and miracle workers, who promise authority, power and total domination. It is these times that sink into populist religious fundamentalism, which results in violent messianism. In the violence of force, in the violence of authority, in the violence of domination, in physical violence, in the violence of emotion, but also in violence of the gaze and symbols."
(Chrysostomos Stamoulis, What is the fox looking for in the bazaar? Texts on the dialogue of Orthodoxy with the city, politics and culture, ‘The flying step of intention’, Armos Publications, 2016).

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